Amazon Turns To VR To Boost Furniture Sales

Amazon is hoping to increase purchases of furniture online, rolling out a new feature dubbed Amazon Showroom that takes advantage of virtual reality tools.

According to a report in Chain Store Age, the new feature lets online shoppers place 3D images of furniture into a virtual room to get a sense of how it would really look. The room’s wall colors can be changed, as well as the carpet and flooring. In addition to seeing how furniture looks in rooms with other colors and flooring, shoppers can add products and entire room designs to the room and then purchase it. The new feature works with both Amazon’s mobile app and online.

Amazon isn’t the only one embracing virtual reality to boost furniture and room furnishing sales. According to the report, Wayfair rolled out Wayfair Spaces recently, which is an interior design and room planning app. Shoppers can use items for designed rooms to see how they would look in their homes with the help of mixed reality, noted the report.

This past summer Walmart got into the virtual reality game, reportedly filing for two patents focused on virtual reality. In one filing Walmart is seeking a patent for a headset and gloves that would enable consumers to engage with a virtual store, while another one involved robots that would prepare items for shipping via virtual reality technology.

While Amazon is relying on virtual reality to boost sales of furniture, it’s doing brisk business in selling things via voice command. For the holiday season Amazon said voice orders increased three times compared to a year ago, with Alexa also being called hundreds of thousands of times to help consumers find cocktail recipes, listen to hundreds of millions of more hours of music compared to a year ago and turn on the holiday lights tens of millions of times during the holiday season.